The passionate pilgrim
Pat Rogers
The Flesh is Frail: Byron's Letters and Journals, Volume 6: 1818-1819 edited by Leslie A. Marchand (John Murray £5.95) Byron Elizabeth Longford (Hutchinson/ Weidenfeld and Nicolson £4.25) The progress of this splendid edition of Byron's letters appears to get faster and more unstoppable as the momentum of his career increases. There has hardly been time to absorb Volume Five, which covered the period of his break with his wife and removal to Venice. New readers may start here, with Byron at thirty, settled in a palazzo on the Grand Canal (into which he would incontinently plunge at intervals). Time was beginning to leave its ravages; he was a little podgier, his hair was half grey and 'though not gone seems going'. He was searching the place for a good dentist — 'every two or three years one ought to consult one'. Such physical changes were only to be expected; as he drily put it, 'Mine has not been the most regular—nor the most tranquil of lives'. But the old spirit remained: indeed it is doubtful whether any period displays more élan, more sparkle or more Byronic bustle. Two crowded years of creativity, haggling, carousing—an exis tence maintained at fever pitch. 'It is the height of the Carnival--and I am in the estrum and agonies of a new intrigue'.
Faced with all this, a reviewer is tied by custom and ceremony; one might almost be proposing a toast to the bridesmaids. Pro fessor Marchand deserves one more instalment of praise for his wonderfully discreet editing; elegant variations on a well-worn theme, but abundantly merited all the same. The old editions, Prothero especially, were glum-looking and dry in presentation. By contrast the new volumes make attractive reading; even the appendices (including a list of forged letters) prove enticing. Pedantry, parent of angled brackets and jumbled layout, is held well in check. Most of the really good letters were in previous collections, and those to Thomas Moore remain unavoidably tidied up, and probably expurgated. But there are very many new items, and altogether the advance upon previous collections is immeasurable.
Byron began the year 1818 as the author of Childe Harold, whose final canto was shipped back to England during January. By the end of 1819 he had published the first two cantos of Don Juan and had completed a first draft of the third ('very decent— but dull—damned dull'). He had also produced Beppo, an experiment in ottava rima that paved the way for Don Juan. It was a major shift in creative direction which the letters treat, like most matters, with the deep seriousness that only high comedy can engender. Don Juan's initial adventures were not as badly received as Byron chose to think ('There has been an eleventh commandment to the women not to read it—and what is still more extraordinary they seem not to have broken it'). He even offered to pay Murray back the copyright money, a quixotic gesture in view of the hard bargaining earlier CI love money, so get what you can for the MS present and to come'—that is the first two cantos.) On another occasion he wrote, 'Pray tell Murray top. in money, not in bills-1 will have ready money-1 am sure I always give him ready poetry'.
Nor were his amorous energies in any degree weakened. Starting with a dose of gonorrhea given gratis by a courtesan during the carnival, he fairly rapidly disposed of the tempestuous Margarita Cogni, who promptly chucked herself into the canal and had to be fished out on to Byron's staircase. He felt a deeper commitment to his next mistress, Countess Guiccioli, 'fair as Sunrise--and warm as Noon'. He wrote that she was 'a sort of an Italian Caroline Lamb, except that She is much prettier, and not so savage', an odious comparison for the relatively level-headed and civilised Teresa. Certain difficulties attended Byron's role as recognised cavalier: 'Her husband is a very polite personage—but I wish he would not carry me out in his Coach and Six like Whittington and his Cat'. Byron followed the Guiceioli to Ravenna during the summer of 1819 and there wrote a poem in terza rima on Dante's exile. When he got back to Venice he fell ill with a tertian fever and was nursed by Teresa; but the Count was tiring of the arrangement, and gave his wife a list of conditions and provisos, like some Venetian Mirabell. Byron began to review his situation: 'I have not had a whore this half-year--confining myself to the strictest adultery'.
Yet the frantic activity goes with an inner sense of isolation. Most of the people who really affected his destiny were far away— his estranged wife, his beloved Augusta, his friends in London. He sold Newstead Abbey and signed the deed halfway across Europe; Byron had expected his books to be brought out with the papers, but all he got were some corn-rubbers and a kaleidoscope on which he cut his finger. There were lists of incongruous creditors to peruse. like a certain Mealey: 'There is no Hopkinson of Southwell—and if there were I owe him nothing'. He followed English politics with some avidity, and sneered at the death of his old adversary Sir Samuel Romilly, who cut his throat on losing his wife. There were interesting visitors—the Shelleys. Moore, and others—but they did not stay for long. He made plans for his natural daughter Allegra, who had 'a good deal of the Byron': as for his 'little Legitimacy', he hoped Ada would be taught Italian--but he had no means of enforcing it. He thought that he might do his own best work in the Italian language, for that matter; he dreamed of becoming a planter in Venezuela, which Bolivar was in the process of liberating. He ate scampi, defended Pope. imagined himself dead, wrote references signed 'Byron (Peer of England)' and letters to the press signed Wortley Clutterbuck• His wit and verbal inventiveness never flag: Murray is 'you chicken-hearted, silverpaper Stationer you', and he announces (outdoing Mark Twain), 'I read my death in the papers,—which was not true'. He cannot judge the classical scholar Porson 'as I never saw him sober'. He laments Lady Melbourne, his best female friend: 'When I say "friend", 1 mean not mistress, for that's the antipode'. It is genius in full flood, backed by an amazing power of literary recall. Shakespeare is everywhere, particularly the Venetian plays and the histories; Falstaff. the alter ego of the season, slips in again and again. Musing among the tombs at Bologna. he meets a truly Shakespearian sexton who claims to have buried fifty-three thousand persons, and proves to have 'the prettiest daughter imaginable'.
Even the most gifted expositor must pale beside Byron's exuberantly resourceful prose, and Lady Longford is not quite that. What she has produced is a straightforward, perky sort of biography; all the gloomy side is there but an underlying equanimity keeps
breaking in. It is a compact, well-illustrated book, as easy to read as it seems to have been to write. Now and then the English goes a little odd (Napoleon had been 'a macrocosm of the young rake'), and there are historical lapses: the Harleian manuscripts 'undoubtedly fathered' by the fifth Earl of Oxford were collected by the first and second Earls and had passed to the British Museum sixty years before. Such slips are redeemed by the sympathy Lady Longford has brought to her task; she can tell a good story, as of the exhumation of Byron s remains in 1938, and without rivalling Peter Quennell offers a digestible popular account. She will certainly lead some readers to Byron's own writing, and that is the main thing.
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